Robinson's language, however, is always the result of taste and temper, not of
conscious theorizing; and therefore in each poem it adapts itself without difficulty to
the materials and the mood. Hence, the range of his interests and sympathies, the sweep
and intensity of his vision, give birth to more various forms of expression than are to be
found in the work of most of his contemporaries. The words are not always those of simple
men, nor the music always the steady elemental rhythm of the outward movement of daily
life. Beneath the surface of even normal existence are unsounded depths of endurance,
unsuspected surgings of desire. To deal justly with these is a task to which the poet must
devote the full resources of language, however long and often some of them may have been
used before. To reject the old because it is not new is mere affectation.

So it is without hesitation that Robinson resorts at times to the grand style and to
the rhetorical devices that have been for centuries an accepted part of the poetic craft
of the Western world. The sober and serviceable words that fit the unreflective Reuben
Bright, gripped suddenly by dumb grief, yield in the portrait of Eben Flood, for whom
derelict years have not dimmed the remembrance of other days when stately doors stood wide
to receive him and a world of achievement lay all before him, to a rich and resonant music
only a little thinned by distance.

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He Stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Ebens eyes were dim.

On this passage we may pause for a brief analysis of sound effects and the devices by
which they are secured. Of these, two are dominant, assonance and alliteration: the
placing near each other of stressed syllables in which the same or similar vowel sounds
occur in conjunction with different consonant sounds; and the spacing at close intervals
of stressed syllables beginning with the same or similar consonant sounds followed by
different vowel sounds. Something halfway between these two is the use of differing vowel
sounds at the beginning of stressed syllables. Further, the use of the same consonant
sound at the end or in the middle, as well as at the beginning, of adjacent words is not
without effect.

Thus, in the stanza quoted, we find instances of assonance in such combinations as
"valiant," "armor," and "scarred"; "road,"
"Roland's," "ghost," "below," and "town";
"winding" and "silent"; and "phantom,"
"salutation," and "rang." Alliteration occurs unobtrusively in
"scarred," "stood," and "silent"; and more obviously in
"town" and "trees." Different vowels at the beginning of stressed
syllables are found in "end," "armor," and "outworn"; in
"other" and "honored"; and in "old" and "eyes."
The most obvious repetition of a consonant, leaving aside alliteration and rhyme is that
of d in "end," "scarred," "stood,"
"middle," "road," "had," "honored,"
"dead," and "old"; but the repetition of 1 and n also
contributes to the total effect.

There seems no point in carrying such analysis further. If the reader chooses, he may
note in the quotations throughout this study the constant presence of the devices just
described. The main concern of the critic is not with the process but with the result:
with how the sound supports the meaning, how it clarifies or intensifies the character,
the mood, or the philosophic conception that the poet isstriving to incarnate in
words.

[. . . ]

Only, an age of doubt has intervened, and his most common moral isthat
moralizing is dangerous.

From this attitude springs the practice, already noted in the sonnets, and followed
also in some of the finest of his other short poems, of simply telling his story and
leaving the application to the reader, only attaching at the end a summary or restatement
that may give rise to reflection. Here we find The Gift of God, The Poor Relation,
Miniver Cheevy, Vickery's Mountain, and Mr. Flood's Party. The last of these
will show the poet's gift for compressing into a few seemingly effortless concluding lines
the mood and theme of the whole. Mr. Flood's partyattended by his two selves, his
jug, and two moonsis ended, and the hard reality presses in upon him once more:

There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Perhaps none of Robinson s works, though, show better than "Mr. Flood's
Party" what Robinson could do, when he would, in subtly and intricately
interweaving image and symbol in a way that has come to be thought of as
characteristically modern. Though he is no Eliot, Joyce, or Yeats even here, in
"Mr. Flood's Party" Robinson so skillfully implements his statement of
theme with patterns of symbol and metaphor that it seems certain that if he had
written more consistently in this mode and less often in the flat, prosy manner
of "Richard Cory" and "Cliff Klingenhagen" his right to
designation as major and modern might be more generally agreed upon than it has
been in the years since he lived and wrote.

The main theme or point of "Mr. Flood's Party" is a consideration
of the effects upon human experience of the passage of time. And to the
elaboration of this theme virtually all of the major figures of speech or
symbols in the poem are functionally and organically related, either directly or
indirectly. The first word in the poem, old, immediately touches upon the
theme of the effects of time's passing, while the next two words are also
related to that theme as well as being symbolic in their relationship. For in
giving the name Eben Flood tohis protagonist, Robinson created a
sort of symbolic pun, which may be read either ebb and flood or ebbing
flood. The former reading, ebb and flood, suggests a pattern of
coming and going which proves to be basically related to the poem’s theme and
is therefore the preferable reading; also, the latter reading, ebbing flood, has
the additional disadvantage of an inherent self-contradiction since ebb and
flood are opposite concepts. However, no matter which reading of the pun
one prefers, there can be little doubt that in choosing such a name as Eben
Food Robinson had in mind the common association between tide and time and
perhaps even the familiar adage, "Time and tide wait for no man." Thus
in naming his protagonist as he did, Robinson related his character both to the
centrally significant pattern in the poem of coming and going; and to the poem's
theme of the passage of time, which themselves are interrelated, of course.

Another symbolism carefully initiated in stanza one is that based upon the
contrast between Mr. Flood's solitary house high on the hill and the community
or town below. The main effect of the passage of time in the case of Mr. Flood,
as in the case of many people, has been loneliness; time has taken away those
with whom he had any meaningful associations. Symbolically, Robinson has
identified this aloneness with the "forsaken" mountain top and the
experience of human contact or communion with the populated valley below.
However, the dramatic action of the poem takes place neither at the mountain top
nor in the valley, but, as Robinson carefully points out in line two, between
the two extremes. In keeping with this symbolic in-betweenness of location
of the dramatic action, the experience of Mr., Flood's party is somewhere
in-between the two extremes of absolute aloneness and communion with other
humans, for after imbibing from his jug he has at least another Mr. Flood to be
with. The jug, of course, and the whole episode of the party reflect the
touching and ironic effects upon a person of time’s leaving him without human
associations. Such a person finds that the pain of loneliness can be assuaged by
the contents of a jug, as brought out partly symbolically and partly literally
by the second Mr. Flood, who is as much of human company as old Eben can now
know and who, as such, Eben finds better than no company at all.

Another explanation for Mr. Flood's decision to go ahead and have a party—"Well
Mr. Flood,/ Since you propose it, I believe I will"—is brought out
symbolically in stanza two where, the decision is made. In that stanza, two more
sets of symbols relate directly to the passage of time. First, the moon, whose
luminescence pervades the scene just as its metaphorical force permeates the
poem's meaning, has been, with its ceaseless coming and going and waxing and
waning, an age old symbol of change and the passage of time. Moreover, Robinson
stipulates that Mr. Flood's is a harvest or autumn moon, the fall of the
year being a traditional symbol for late years in life. The other symbol related
to time's passage is the fleeting bird mentioned by old Eben. Birds, usually
beautiful and graceful, suggest youth, vigor, life itself perhaps; and such
things are transient, like the bird flying swiftly away. Actually, Mr. Flood's
reference to a bird goes even further than this, though, for it involves a
literary allusion. The poet who had said that the "bird is on the
wing"—in about the same figurative sense that Eben and Robinson meant
that line—was Edward Fitzgerald in his translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam, which also directly concerns itself with the effects upon man of
time's passing. The lines from the Rubaiyat alluded to read as follows:
"Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring/Your Winter garment of
Repentance fling:/ The Bird of Time has but a little way/ To flutter and the
Bird is on the Wing." The reaction to the transience of temporal things
expressed in these lines and repeatedly suggested elsewhere in the Rubaiyat is
the philosophy of carpe diem, enjoy the day, make the most of this moment
for the next moment may take all away. Mr. Flood in his party is grasping what
few small pleasures he can from fleeting life; almost with the reader's
approval, because of the sympathy evoked for his situation by Robinson's
portrayal, he is adopting the philosophy of carpe diem. As in the other
cases already examined, then, the symbol and metaphor inherent in the allusion
to the Rubaiyat functionally implement Robinson's statement of theme.

Stanza three is perhaps the most thoroughly figurative stanza in the poem.
Opening with a word that again reminds the reader of the central theme, the word
alone, Robinson then initiates a series of interrelated similes, symbols,
and metaphors that make up the next four lines. In line four the image of Roland
is evoked, the jug held up to Eben's lips being compared to the horn that Roland
blew to signal Charlemagne—all too late—that he needed help. The simile of
Roland's ghost is made more effective by the metaphor in the previous lines;
instead of armor of iron and steel like that of Roland, old Eben wears an armor
of "scarred hopes outworn," in other words, the protective shell of
detachment and imperviousness to the buffetings of life that one is able to
develop after long years of frustrations, defeats, and losses coming one upon
another. And additional element of allusion in the knight and armor imagery may
be a suggestion of the glory of time past as compared to the bleak present; the
likelihood of such an element of meaning is increased by the fact that such use
is made of chivalry and knighthood in other poems by Robinson, the most familiar
of which is "Miniver Cheevy." Still another touch of symbolic or
metaphorical significance in the Roland image derives from the fact that Roland,
though not as old as Eben, was about to die, as one feels that Mr. Flood may be
about to die in the not-too-distant future. This notion may be confirmed by the
fact that there are a good many suggestions of death in ~stanza three and in the
poem in general. For example, Roland's ghost is chosen rather than just Roland
himself, and also the answer to Mr. Flood's imaginary blast upon the imaginary
horn is a "phantom salutation of the dead." In addition to these
elements in stanza three, one recalls that Fitzgerald's line said that "The
Bird of Time has but a little way/ To flutter . . ." and that in stanza two
Eben had said of the harvest moon ". . . we may not have many more."
In short, one feels that Eben and the former friends whose salutation answers
his call may soon be reunited in death.

But the poem is not predominantly about death but rather about what Mr. Flood
has left of life, which is very little. This heightened moment of communion with
himself, artificially stimulated though it may be, is about as rich an
experience as is now possible to Eben Flood. And after a fourth stanza in which
Robinson does little more than indirectly comment upon Mr. Flood's past
experience and knowledge of life's difficulties through a couple of similes in
reference to the jug, the poet describes that heightened moment—the party
itself—in stanzas five and symbol or metaphor, but it is cast in terms of
dramatic dialogue and action rather than in the abstract narrative style of
"Richard Cory." The same is true of stanza six, except that in the
last lines of this stanza some degree of symbolic suggestion is achieved. The
two moons in line seven, of course, represent the alcoholic effects of Mr.
Flood's indulgence on the one hand, the degree of the effect of the drink being
thus indirectly indicated, but the two moons also symbolically parallel the two
Mr. Floods, one of which was also brought into existence the contents of the
jug. But by far the most important symbol in the stanza is the song itself,
which makes the whole landscape harmonious. The song is important because, as
Charles T. Davis points out in his article on Robinson's imagery, Robinson
fairly frequently used song and harmony to represent perception or spiritual
truth or "understanding or truth in human relationships." One might
bend that meaning some, in this case, to suggest that the song simply represents
a moment of heightened experience. Davis also shows that Robinson frequently
used light as a symbol in much the same way that he used music and harmony,
which gives even more meaning to the moonlight that permeates the scene and
pervades the poem. However, though the song and light probably both represent a
moment of heightened experience—in traditional as well as in Robinsonian terms—any
insight, perception of truth, or understanding of human relationships that they
might represent in this case would have to be rather limited or negative.
Perhaps they could represent Mr. Floods awareness that he might as well make the
most of his own company as the only "human relationship"
available tohim, but hardly, anything more hopeful or optimistic than
that. The particular song that is sung itself suggests negativism and lack of a
hopeful future, for as with the backward-looking elements of meaning in the
knight image, "Auld Lang Syne" suggests a moment’s re-evocation of
better times from the past, but only that.

In the final stanza, the words the song being done not only say
symbolically that the heightened experience is over but also again suggest that
Mr. Flood's life itself may nearly be done, a suggestion corroborated by the
weariness of Eben's throat. The line "There was not much ahead of him"
says figuratively what the preceding paragraph of this analysis concluded about
Mr. Flood’s future—figuratively if the path up the hillside and the empty
house at the top are thought of—and also what the symbols of the shut doors
two lines later say again. The, open door is another recurrent symbol in
Robinson's work which Davis mentions, a symbol of entrance upon a new world or a
new life, a symbol of new vistas achieved by men as they progress from stage to
stage of life (p. 386). It is symbolically and ironically significant, then,
that all doors are now shut to Mr. Flood, who can only look backward with
himself to the time when more genuine human associations had made new and
meaningful experiences possible, backward to the "many doors/ That many
friends had opened long ago." The last two words of the poem, long ago, like
the last two lines in general, touch once more upon the poem's central theme, as
did the first three words, old Eben Flood. And, as has been seen, the
many symbols, figures of speech and images throughout the poem also touch upon
the same theme—the theme of the effects upon man's life of the passage of
time, of the coming and going of life's tide, the waxing and waning of life's
moon, the rising up and dying out of life's song.

Such carefully worked interplay of symbols and richly suggestive metaphorical
language make "Mr. Flood’s Party" on of Robinson’s most successful
short pieces. If he had written more consistently in the mode of "Mr.Flood's
Party," using symbol and metaphor to implement statement of theme and to
avoid his "drift toward an abstract and somewhat arid speech" (Davis,
p. 381) , Robinson might perhaps today be more generally considered as equal to
his fellow regionalist, Robert Frost, in both stature and modernity.

An old man living alone on the outskirts of Tilbury Town has gone into town to fill his
jug with liquor. Returning home, he stops along the road and invites himself to have a
drink. He accepts the invitation several times until the bottle is empty, after which
presumably he makes his way back to his "forsaken upland hermitage."
"Turned down for alcoholic reasons" by Collier's, "Mr. Flood's
Party," was first published in the Nation, November 24, 1920. The origin of
the poem goes back twenty-five years--to the time when Robinson was working on his prose
sketches. Harry de Forest Smith had told him of an interesting character that he knew.
"I am going to take a change of air," Robinson wrote Smith, "and write a
little thing to be called 'Saturday,' of which you will be indirectly the father, as it is
founded on the amiable portrait of one Mr. Hutchings in bed with a pint of rum and a pile
of dime novels." Mr. Flood is one of Robinson's original "scattered lives,"
wonderfully transmuted over the years.

"Mr. Flood's Party" is in some ways much like "Miniver Cheevy" and
"Richard Cory." It is a character sketch, a miniature drama with hints and
suggestions of the past; its tone is a blend of irony, humor, and pathos. Yet it is, if
not more sober, at least mote serious, and a finer poem. It is more richly conceived and
executed, and it contains two worlds, a world of illusion and a world of reality. A longer
poem with a more complex stanza pattern and a heightened use of language, its theme fully
informs the poem: it is dramatically represented by Mr. Flood and given emotional and
intellectual depth by means of interrelated allusions and images focused on a central
symbol. The theme is the transience of life; the central symbol is the jug. Both the theme
and the symbolic import of the jug are announced in the line "The bird is on the
wing, the poet says," though only the theme, implicit in the image, is immediately
apparent. Its relationship to the jug goes back to its source in the Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter - and the Bird is on the Wing.

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

The transience symbols coupled with the eat-drink-and-be-merry philosophy of the Rubáiyát
prepare the way for Mr. Flood's party but also intensify the poignance and sharpen the
irony. In stanza three, the passage referring to "Roland's ghost winding a silent
horn" is the richest in the poem, both in language and in suggestion. It serves a
multiple function. The likening of Mr. Flood with lifted jug to Roland, the most
courageous of Charlemagne's knights, blowing his magic horn presents a vivid picture, made
both striking and humorous by the incongruity. At the same time, however, it is a means of
adding pathos and dignity to the figure of Mr. Flood, for there are some similarities. By
the time that Roland blew his horn the last time, all his friends were dead; like Mr.
Flood he reminisced about the past, and his eves were dim. Moreover, be had fought
valiantly and endured to the end, and these attributes of courage and endurance are
transferred to Mr. Flood. (The expression "enduring to the end" has a double
reference behind it--it calls to mind the words of Jesus when he sent forth his disciples,
"He that endureth to the end shall be saved," a statement that Browning said was
the theme of his "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The Roland allusion is
even more subtle. The comparison is not to Roland blowing his horn in broad daylight and
surrounded by the newly dead, but to the ghost of Roland, and the horn he is
winding is a "silent horn." Roland, the last to die, is seeking his phantom
friends. So is Mr. Flood. Lighted by the harvest moon glinting on the "valiant
armor" of Roland-Flood, this is a world of the past, dim and mute. Fusion of figure
and scene is complete. "Amid the silver loneliness / Of night" Mr. Flood creates
his own illusory world with his jug.

The significance of the jug symbol, foreshadowed by the Rubáiyát and
Roland references, becomes clear in an extended simile at the mid and focal point of the
poem:

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break.

The interplay of similarities and dissimilarities in the relationship of
mother:child and Mr.Flood:jug is too delicate and suggestive to be pinned down
and spoiled by detailed analysis. Suffice it to say here that in the child the future is
contained; in the jug, the past. Memories flood in as Eben drinks, and he lives once more,
temporarily secure, among "friends of other days," who "had honored
him," opened their doors to him, and welcomed him home. Two moons also keep him
company, one real and one illusory. A last drink and the singing of "Auld Lang
Syne," with its "auld acquaintance" and "cup o' kindness," and
the party is over. And with a shock we and Mr. Flood are back in the harsh world of
reality which frames the poem and his present and fleeting life:

There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below.

The loneliness of an old man, the passing of time; Eben Flood, ebb and flood. There is
no comment, and none is needed.

The striking and functional contrast between the rich figurative language of stanza
three in "Mr. Flood's Party" and the final unadorned lines suggests something of
the range of language found in Robinson's poetry.

When nature became inhospitable to spirit for Robinson, he recognized that
man, if he stands upright at all, stands alone; he is the only instance of
spirit and therefore the only evidence of its nature and destiny. When
self-knowledge cannot come through communication with nature, man must turn
inward or to his kind—to introspection or to what is "between man and
man." With nature dead, man must open himself to man, to his spiritual
being mirrored in his own reflection or the fate of others. For this reason
Robinson’s immediate subject is man. Nowhere does he announce this fact in so
many words, yet there can be no doubt about it, his entire poetic work being
cogent testimony of it. Judging from his titles alone—for example, "Luke
Havergal," "Eben Flood" . . . .

Correspondingly, as he became more sophisticated about truth, he became more
intent upon, and more proficient at, cultivating obscurity. Like Howells, and in
accordance with the interests of realism, he regarded his work in the early
stage of his career as largely "an attempt to show the poetry of the
commonplace." Though his theory and practice were in some ways as
incongruent as Wordsworth’s in Lyrical Ballads, he sought,
nevertheless, to make poetry out of, or to find poetry in, the real as he
understood it at this time—things as they visually are. Consequently, his
early poems at their best tended to be tight, succinct, sharp, concrete, lucid,
vivid, exact. Poems like "Flammonde," "Richard Cory," "Eben
Flood," though each in different ways, derive their power from
concreteness, from clarity achieved through sharp observation. Instead of
practice resulting in greater concreteness and vividness, which might seem the
logical and customary course, he became progressively more obscure, until in the
late long poems his narratives are so dimly motivated and tortuously plotted
that it is a major task just to determine what happens in them. These poems are
in no way devoted to the poetry of the commonplace, and as a consequence the
language in them becomes relatively dissociated from things seen, actual speech,
and concrete situations. Passionate, long-winded talk; general, abstract
diction; relatively formal, "high-toned" syntax; circumlocution and
rhetoric become in them the hallmarks of Robinson’s style.

From Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry in the Act. Ó
1967 by the Press of Western Reserve University.

Nancy Joyner

"Mr. Flood's Party" doubtless stands in the Collected Poems as
Edwin Arlington Robinson intended it, but a manuscript version of the poem
included in the Lewis M. Isaacs Collection of Robinsoniana in the New York
Public Library concludes in an entirely different manner from that of the
printed version. Unfortunately, the manuscript is undated. It is, however, a
signed, holographic fair copy. Probably it was written prior to the one that was
published, and, since it is not a rough draft, one must assume that Robinson at
one time seriously considered that version as the final form. Because the last
stanza radically changes the interpretation of the poem, a comparison between
the two versions is instructive.

The concluding stanza in the manuscript is as follows:

"For auld lang syne."—The weary throat gave out,
The last word perished, and the song was done.
He raised again the jug regretfully,
And without malice would have ambled on;
But hearing in the bushes a new sound,
He smote with new profanity the cause,—
And shook an aged unavailing fist
At an inhuman barrage of applause.

While minor variations exist in the first six stanzas of the manuscript and
the published form of the poem, it is only in the last stanza that the change is
significant. The first appearance of the poem concluded with this stanza:

"For auld-lang syne." The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again along.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

The poem was subsequently included in each edition of the Collected Poems.
While minor revisions were made, the poem has not been substantially changed
since its first publication.

The differences in the two concluding stanzas are obvious. From almost every
point of view the two stanzas stand in direct contrast to each other: the
Latinate, polysyllabic diction of the first is exchanged for simple
monosyllables; rather than new action and dramatic content there is a
reiteration of what has already been established; instead of ironic surprise
there is a tone of nostalgia. And most significant is the change in the attitude
toward Mr. Flood, from condescension and even mockery in the early version to
sympathy with a note of admiration for Mr. Flood's stoic endurance.

"Mr. Flood's Party" is one of Robinson's most often anthologized
poems. Emery Neff finds it "the short poem which perhaps best represents
the quality of Robinson's personality and art." Robinson himself has been
quoted as saying, "I suppose Mr. Flood is the best thing I ever
did." The high opinion of this poem may be related to the quality of
Robinson's revisions.

from "An Unpublished Version of Mr. Flood's Party.'" English
language Notes 7 (1969)

John Lucas

It is the withheld word that does the trick: not wearily, but "warily." This
old man has too much native wit to be the object of sentimental pity. For Robinson to draw
our attention to this fact is proof enough of the comic regard in which he holds Mr.
Flood, but it surely emerges in the very way the story opens. How can you resist a poem
that starts as this one does? It is so compelling, so much in the manner of the born
storyteller. As the poem continues, the tale becomes more comic, more outrageously
strange, more humanly fascinating. Robinson is so completely in command that he can switch
the changes in the third stanza from the near-mocking grandiloquence of the opening lines
to the closing lines, which shame our smiles:

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honoured him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

Yet the closing lines clearly need the bracing effect of the mock-heroic that plays
about the first half-stanza if they are not to stray into mere pathos. And consider how
much Robinson risks, and brings off, in the fourth stanza:

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

The control of language in that stanza is as perfect as anyone could wish for. The
simile of the tipsy old man setting his Jug down, like a mother, with "trembling
care," is so audacious and yet so obviously written out of regard for him and not for
cleverness' sake, that it doesn't seem the least bit ingenious or self-regarding.
Moreover, the laconic phrase, "knowing that most things break," strikes me as
exactly the sort of triumph that Robinson's style can bring him: it quite miraculously
holds the balance between the poet's resistance to bathos and his need to honour that
slightly indulgent but sure knowledge that Mr. Flood carries with him. So it is with the
rest of the poem. But here I have simply to quote:

[Lucas quotes the last three lines]

There is really nothing to say about that, except how wonderful it is. You can note the
great line "There was not much that was ahead of him," the wit that is
unwaveringly attentive towards Eben's caution ("Secure, with only two moons
listening"), the comic "Convivially returning with himself"; and so on. But
ticking off the points that make "Mr Flood's Party" a masterpiece comes to feel
a very trivial exercise. What perhaps is worth saying is that it is precisely because
Robinson finds such scenes worth recording that he is so invaluable a poet. For the
subject of "Mr Flood's Party" hardly seems to warrant a poem at all and
certainly not the major poem that Robinson fashions.

"Mr. Flood's Party," one of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town
Portraits, above all shows his mastery of tone, and in this case how such mastery
rescues--almost entirely--his subject matter from the bathos with which it flirts.
"Almost" will be one of the concerns of this essay, though Eben Flood remains a
memorable Robinson character, in the good company of Reuben Bright, Miniver Cheevy,
Richard Cory, and the less-defeated Cliff Klingenhasen.

Eben Flood, his aloneness intensified by old age, may or may not be a drunk, but on
this particular evening he has the regular drinker's comic sense of self-imposed
propriety. He needs to give himself permission. For some, it's when the sun is below the
yardarm; for Eben, the solitary that he is, it's the need for social drinking, for a
companion, to have, as the title suggests, a party. It's one of the smallest and saddest
parties ever registered in a poem, made so by Eben's elaborate formalities with his
compliant alter ego. But the same formalities make us smile, too, which is Robinson's
genius. We are regularly distracted from bathos by felicities both tonal and prosodic.

I found myself admiring Robinson's ambition to work as closely as possible to his
subject while still orchestrating all of its effects. "Reuben Bright" and
"Richard Cory," are also poems that display Robinson's gift for this kind of
intimacy, though their famous endings (one character tears down the slaughterhouse, the
other goes home and puts a bullet through his head) succeed with tones so matter-of-fact
that they suggest a greater balance of distance and intimacy than Robinson was able to
achieve at the end of "Mr. Flood's Party." This may be why the last stanza
doesn't resonate beyond what has already been established in the poem.

The poem's first stanza situates us immediately, both physically and psychologically.
Its five-line opening sentence couldn't be much better paced or orchestrated.

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.

Eben Flood is between a place that is forsaken and a town (we will soon learn) that no
longer remembers him. And this hermitage of his "held as much as he should ever know
/ on earth again of home." The word that pricks us is "again," because it
suggests that home was once a homier place, and no doubt also because of its consonantal
resonance with the other n sounds, as those in "alone" and
"forsaken." And how adroitly Robinson emphasizes "paused" after the
long clause that establishes Eben's plight. The three iambs before it prepare us for an
unstressed syllable. When instead we get a stressed syllable, we feel that a dramatic
moment has been properly timed and delivered, Eben has paused, warily. He's about to begin
his party, and it would be too embarrassing for him if others were about. In the lines
that follow, we dont quite know how good and ironically understated "having
leisure'' is until we read further. And the road Eben is on is "his" in more
ways than one, and more ways than one is how Robinson likes it.

Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more

commences Eben's address to himself and, almost in passing, allows us to hear that he
doesn't expect to live much longer. The poet of "the bird is on the wing" is
Khayyám. Eben has his prop; the social drinker offers a toast to the only companion he
has, and acceptance is guaranteed. They drink to the bird in flight. It's a toast to the
departed or the departing--an excuse to indulge, perhaps even a death wish. Probably both.

The third stanza deepens what we already know, and the highly stressed "a valiant
armor of scarred hopes outworn" distinguishes itself as language while complicating
our attitude toward Mr. Flood. (Eben is valiant; he no longer even has scarred hopes.)
We learn that he once had been "honored" by his friends. The allusion is either
to Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" or to the medieval French
poem "Chanson de Roland." The former suggests a quest and the latter a kind of
stubborn heroism. If it's the former, it's for purposes of comic disparity (Eben's quest
is drink). If it's the latter, there's reason to receive it poignantly, since Roland,
trapped by the enemy, refused to blow his horn to signal help from Charlemagne's army
until the moment of his death, just as plausibly, it is there to suggest that Eben is
already like a ghost. He can hear the town's "phantom salutation of the dead"
calling to him.

But in stanza four, his context firmly established now, Robinson most artfully makes
his poem resonate beyond its sentimental concerns. "He set the jug down slowly at his
feet / Knowing that most things break; / And only when assured that on firm earth / it
stood, as the uncertain lives of men / assuredly did not" are arguably the poem's
finest moments, the poet allowing himself wise asides happily mitigated--though not
reduced--by the fact that he's talking about a jug. No feel of the didactic here. These
editorials on the human condition are rooted in setting and circumstance. Moreover, they
represent a perfect blending of two sources, Eben's thoughts and Robinson's--just the
right intimacy.

Eben's handling of the jug, which carries in it a temporary surcease of loneliness, is
likened to the tenderness with which a mother would handle a sleeping child. This action
is both comedic and heroic. We can imagine the slowness, the delicacy, with which a drunk
puts something down so as not to break it. Eben is in the middle of a journey between two
equally undesirable places, home and town; his heroism is in his effort toward good humor
while he steels himself with drink. The jug is another character in the poem. In modern
parlance, it's his baby, and he will care for it as such.

His invocation to his second self, his drinking companion, is more convivial at this
point than self-pitying, though it's an edgy conviviality: "many a change has come /
to both of us, I fear, since it was / last we had a drop together." The "I
fear" registers with us, as does the end of his toast, "Welcome home!" We
feel the irony in that last word, emphasized by its placement and its rhyme. it should be
noted that Robinson employs only two rhymes (with one exception) in each of his eight-line
stanzas: at the ends of the second and fourth fines and the sixth and the eighth. Here
Robinson gets maximum effect out of rhyme, even though it's more near than exact.
"Home" stops us, or is stopped for us by both its exclamation point and the
click of cooperative sound. We have not forgotten where he is. Home now is stupor, in the
middle of nowhere.

The toast complete, Robinson mimics successfully the manners of the drunk who might
also be a Puritan: "if you insist" and "Only a very little." This is
an engaging burlesque within the larger, pathetic scene. Tonally, at this moment, we as
readers are not asked to feel sorry for Eben. We are allowed to enjoy how well the poet,
by blending tones, has been equal to the psychological and linguistic imperatives of his
task. The lines that follow serve further to demonstrate Robinson's deft comic timing,
which is linked to his metrical brilliance.

For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.
So, for the time, apparently it did.
And Eben evidently thought so too;

Throughout, the poem has employed a mixture of blank verse and rhymed, often loose,
iambic pentameter. The iambic pentameter has been regular enough to permit Robinson many
variations and substitutions. The illusion of natural speech has been maintained while
"the grid of meter" has served as underpinning. To my ear, the line, "For
auld lang syne. No more, sit; that will do," arguably has seven stresses. Only
"For" and "No" and perhaps "will" would seem to be
unstressed. But the prosodic fun occurs with the semicolon after "air." It
breaks the iamb-spondee-iamb flow of the line (a string of two-syllable feet), while
conforming exactly to the way that we trust Eben's elaborate formality with himself would
be spoken. The ten-syllable line has been kept, but has been metrically fractured right at
the point where Eben, or at least half of him, is trying to stop drinking. The narrative
coyness inherent in "apparently" and "evidently" also serve the comic.
Robinson would have us entertain that the narrator-observer, heretofore omniscient, is
suddenly uncertain in this highly managed fiction. The uncertainty serves to underscore
the narrative playfulness at this juncture, as does the placement of "did" after
"do" as end words in successive lines. These are welcome balancing touches in a
poem so potentially sentimental.

In the lines that follow, Robinson returns to a device that worked well for him earlier
in the poem, the apparently positive word or phrase that in context suggests a harsh
irony. Earlier we were told "The road was his" and that Eben had
"leisure." Now Eben is "secure," a word set apart by commas, which
denotatively means he's not worried about being overheard singing out loud. We wait a full
line before the "until" comes, and then his entire landscape echoes back to him
the song of old times, his sad anthem.

I'm not sure what "with only two moons listening" is supposed to mean. It's a
curious moment, the "'only" suggesting that Eben expects more than two. My guess
would be that Eben's selves each have a moon, or that to Eben's drunken eye there appear
to be two moons. Frost's enigmatic reading of the two moons ("Two, as on the planet
Mars.") in his "Introduction to Robinson's King Jasper"seems
only to beg the issue.

When the landscape echoes "For auld lang syne," the poem reaches its climax.
Eben cannot escape the sound of his own lamentation. Afterward, his "weary throat
gave out" and the poem spirals into unrelieved pathos. It is in this stanza that
Robinson's compositional balance of intimacy and distance--his ability to deliver to us
with multiple tones this valiant, sad, and drunken man--fails him. He can only sum up for
us what we already know. One longs for some resonance comparable to what he was able to
effect in stanza four, a line that would evaluate and measure Eben's condition as much as
it declares it, or the sudden rightness that makes poetry poetry.

"Mr. Flood's Party" is a very good poem by a very good poet, as close to a
great poet as a very good poet can be. Who knows, perhaps a great poet. I wouldn't argue.
But in "Mr. Flood's Party," Robinson's language at the end neither pulls back
far enough to position Eben as sufferer, nor does he stay close enough to him to
participate sufficiently in his thoughts. Instead Robinson gets caught in the middle, a
toneless ground that has to depend on easy (if momentarily effective) wordplay and
juxtaposition: ahead/below; many doors/many friends, would have shut/had opened. Closure
is accomplished, but tonal resonance is lost.

Compositional intimacy, like most intimacy, may be at its best when one keeps in
reserve something peculiarly his own to, at last, give away. Robinson had said all he had
to say about Eben halfway through the last stanza. But before that he gave us an
exquisitely managed portrait of a man presumably without family and who had outlived his
friends, struggling one evening to create his own solace.

Of all Robinsons many failures, perhaps the most sympathetic is old Eben Flood of
"Mr. Flood's Party," because in his case the failure is from a weakness not of
conscience but of flesh: old age has overwhelmed him and left him friendless, an unwilling
exile, doomed to holding an ironic "party" with himself. His name is as symbolic
as Richard Cory's, since pronouncing Eben Flood as if Eben is short for Ebenezer
leads to the conclusion that while his fortunes may once have been at their flood,
they are now at their ebb: "There was not much that was ahead of him." We see
Mr. Flood pathetically alone, on a hillside looking down at the town where he was once
happy, "Where friends of other days had honored him." Now he has only himself,
and he has sought solace in drink, having carried along with him "The jug that he had
gone so far to fill," from which he offers a toast to himself in the silence and
darkness. Robinson ironically compares his Mr. Flood to two literary figures: Omar
Khayyam, the Persian author of "The bird is on the wing" (Robinson quotes these
words in "Mr. Flood's Party" from Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubayatt:
"the Bird of Time, has but a little while / To flutter, and the bird is on the
wing"); and Roland, the medieval knight who in The Song of Roland blew his
horn too late to bring reinforcements to the Christian troops of Charlemagne to save them
from the attacking Moors. In the first case, Mr. Flood quotes Omar to say, not that he has
little time to enjoy wine, women, and song as Omar did, but that he has little time to
live, and in the second case, he catches Mr. Flood just as he is raising his jug to drink
and says he is "Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn." The allusions imply
a doubly ironic contrast: Mr. Flood's drinking alone in old age shows neither the Persian
poet's lighthearted hedonism nor the French knight's heroic martyrdom, but an ironic
pathos at the end of life.

Later in the poem, Mr. Flood "lifted up his voice and sang" the familiar New
Year's Eve drinking song "For Auld Lang Syne." Burns's Scottish words are
nostalgic, but convivial, about "times long past," but they, too, have an ironic
ring coming from Mr. Floods lips, accented by the additional mockery of his slightly
drunken condition, which is "Secure, with only two moons listening." There is a
saving humor in this tipsy figure to relieve the pathos in Robinsons realistic
portrait of the old man, who at the end is left with a bleak landscape around him and a
lonely fate to contemplate, since

there was nothing in the town below
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Eben Flood is the last of his generation in Tilbury Town, and Robinsons poem
places him in the New England townscape as it dramatizes memorably, yet wryly, the
pitiable state of extreme old age.